MAN=EATING TREE

Waikato Times, Volume 124, Issue 20733, 17 February 1939, Page 2

MAN=EATING TREE

MADAGASCAN ODDITY VICTIM HELPLESS IN EMBRACE Mr Chase Salmon Osborn, an American scientist, tells a remarkable story in his book on ‘'Madagascar” of a tree which is reputed to eat human beings. A lurid and dramatic description is that -written in 1878 by a traveller named Carle Liche, in a letter to Dr. Omelium Fredlowski, a Pole “The Inkodos of Madagascar are a very primitive race, going entirelv naked, having only faint vestiges of tribal relations, and no religion beyond that of the awful reverence which they pay to the sacred tree. They dwell entirely in caves hollowed out of the limestone rocks in their hills, and are one of the smallest races, the men seldom exceeding 56in in height. “At the bottom of the valley, and near its eastern extremity, we came to a deep, tarn-like lake about a mile in diameter, the sluggish, oily water of which overflower into a tortuous reedy canal that went unwillingly into the recesses of a black forest* composed of jungle below the palms above. A path diverging from its southern side struck boldly for the heart of the forbidding and seemingly impenetrable forest. Hendrick led the way along this path, and I following closely, and behind me a curious rabble of Inkodos. men, women and children. Suddenly all the natives began to cry, ‘Tepe*! TepeP and Hendrick, stopping short, said, ‘Look!’ The sluggish canallike stream here wound slowly by, and in a bare spot in its bend was the most singular of trees.”

The writer describes the tree as resembling a pineapple. Bft high and thick in proportion, with eight enormous leaves, while the apex of the cone was a round white concave figure like a smaller plate within a larger one. The natives, on reaching the tree, began to chant propitiary hymns to the great tree-devil. Shrieks and Chants “With still wilder shrieks and chants they now surrounded one of the women now urged her with the points of their javelines, until slowly, and with despairing face, she climbed up the stalk of the tree and stood on the summit of the cone, the palpi swirling all about, her. Stooping, she drank of the viscid fluid in the ci*p. rising instantly again, with wild frenzy in her face. Rut she did not jump down, as she seemed to intend to do. The atrocious cannibal tree that had been so inert and dead came to sudden savage life. The slender, delicate palpi, with the fury of starved serpents, quivered a moment over her head, then, as if by instinct, with demoniac intelligence, fastened upon her in sudden coils round and round her neck and arms, while her awful screams and vet more awful laughter rose wildly to be instantly strangled down again into a gurgling groan. Like the Arms of a Derrick “Now the great leaves slowly rose and stillv. like the arms of a derrick, erected themselves in the air. approached one another, and closed about Urn dead and hampered victim with the silent force <»f a hydraulic press. A moment more, and while i could see

l at once. .\oi a Ihing v.eni wrung. | the bases of these great lovers pressling more tightly towards each oilier j from their interstices there trickle,l ! down the stalks nr the true great | streams of the viscid honey-like fluid, mingled with the I f thr virion |At sight of Mils the sava.e hordes around me. yellins nu.dly. bounded ; forward. crowded lo 11m live, clasped it. and with i•':i• >. !i m.i, ,nd , tongues. i : , im -dd,tim'd mmu-h t.f i the liquor iu send 1b in mad and 1 frantic. 1 *